Alaskan_Son

The system you described sounds like it's right at the minimum requirements. You'll probably have to walk through some settings with tech support. Until then, I would suspect one of your rendering preferences.

In Chiefs defense, what you are describing is highly unusual. Hopefully they'll help you get it sorted out tomorrow. In the meantime...can you post your computer specs (including operating system and video card)? Also, when's the last time you updated your video card drivers or rebooted your system?

Did you contact tech support?

Stephen, It looks like you probably need to familiarize yourself with the roof tab in the wall DBX. You can set the pitch for individual roof sections on a wall by wall basis to achieve a wide variety of roof styles. I think this may be one of the most commonly overlooked and underutilized capabilities in Chief.

I have very little experience with Softplan. Gave it a quick try once and hated it. Do you realize that you can draw a basline polyline in Chief too??

Well said Lew

You're very welcome.

Don't really have time to get into your second question right now but I'm sure its possible by placing the various objects on unique layers floor by floor.

Steve, For your first question...Those walls actually ARE framing. You have those walls on your "Walls, Foundation" layer though. You can get the framing to show by either... A. Turning the Walls, Foundation layer off B. Placing those walls on their own unique layer and turning that layer off.

Plan file?

This is an odd one... Polyline solids as well as a number of other things get their material defaults from the Foundation/Slab material defaults. You can change that but then it affects a whole bunch of other things as well. Might be a good one for the suggestion forum.

Ya, I think in all the years I've been using Chief I only ever made one walk-through and that was just for kicks. I don't personally find them all that useful. That's just me though. I find still images allow me a lot more control...especially when trying to narrow the focus to a specific item or idea like I'm usually wanting to do with most of my renderings.

I have everything set the exact same as you do with the exception of the walk through codec. That shouldn't matter though. Maybe try deleting that texture and downloading the version you attached. Like I said earlier, maybe something changed during the zipping process...just an idea.

I'm sure Joe and Gerry realize this but for anyone else reading along… If you are trying to write a line of code that will work for any and all possible values (excluding negative numbers for the time being) be careful using .sub or .gsub because for example where a=0.75 and b=20.5: a.to_s.sub("0", "") will return the desired .75 BUT b.to_s.sub("0","") will return 2.5 There are benefits and drawbacks to each of the various methods but in this particular example the reverse.chomp.reverse method has the benefit of only modifying the string if it starts with the specified character(s) (0 or 0. in this instance). If you want to more safely use .sub or .gsub it would be probably a better idea to modify it to something like this... if value.to_s.start_with? ("0") new_str = value.to_s.sub("0", "") else new_str = value end P.S. There's a good chance that Gerry's hieroglyphics contained a shorthand version of that same sequence but I really can't be sure. To be honest I don't really understand most of that shorthand. It's probably a lot more efficient but its harder to read IMO (even if I did understand it...which I don't).

No problem. One quick note regarding the .gsub (global substitution) method. Be careful how and where are you use that as it will substitute every instance of that character pattern from your string. Sometimes it's a better idea to simply use .sub which only removes the first instance of that character pattern or substring. EDIT: I see Joe posted the same thing while I was posting.

Sorry Mark, I was actually editing my previous post when you posted but in short...yes.

Here's one method value.to_s.reverse.chomp("0.").reverse I think there is probably a sprintf function that might do the trick too. There are probably a good half dozen other methods I could come up with too. I think the reverse.chomp.reverse method is probably as good as any though. Essentially what you are doing is converting your value to a string, turning it around, specifying which characters you want removed from the end, and then turning it back around.

Thanks Perry, I thought it was probably about time. I realized that it felt a lot better seeing the faces of people we're dealing with. And I'm not certain how much difference the beard makes with the cold. I don't know, it might do a little. Probably more for wind than anything else. Yesterday I was working out in below zero weather and I had icicles hanging from my face...not kidding. It gets bad sometimes because my breath will freeze onto it and then it looks like I have big honkin' boogercicles. Anyway, I walked into the client's house yesterday (we know the family really well) and Anne had to tell one of her sons..."You can say hi, you don't have to just stare at his beard."

The real reason (from my point of view anyway) for having post numbers is for quick reference without filling up the page too much. Posting the link is a good alternative though and we could even make that much shorter like this... See post here. Thanks Dan The one thing that will continue to be a problem is old threads that used post numbers to reference other posts. We would each have to individually go back and edit each and every one of those instances to clean it up. Its probably not all that big a deal though. I'll use the "replace link with text" option from now on I think.

Joe, you can get the number of downloads for at least your own items by clicking on My Attachments. It would be nice to get both of those capabilities back though. One other capability we seem to have lost was the ability to check "reputation" content. Beyond vain reasons, this was actually a valuable tool to help judge whether not certain things were being well received and found helpful or not. We can still obviously see whether certain posts have been voted up or down but there's no way of easily finding or searching that content.

I have the chair selected instead of the table, but its right here...

BTW, since we're on the subject of rotating polylines...For those of you who don't realize this, you can not only use 3D molding polylines or convert your polylines to symbols to get this functionality but you can also convert your polylines to solids to rotate them. These methods all have their limitations but they also come with certain benefits.

Here's another trick you might like that opens up a few more possibilities. Instead of using a molding, try using a Face and the Revolve tool. This will give you a solid that can be further modified using boolean operations.

Select the table and "Move To Front Of Group". If that doesn't work, make sure the table has a fill applied. In some situations I've resorted to simply creating a new CAD block for the chairs (usually only when they're being placed under a countertop though). Good news is that this should be a whole lot easier in X9 based on some things Chief has hinted at in some other threads.

I prefer building things like that from scratch. This thread is worth checking out. There are others as well though...